Join us at the artist talk featuring Victoria Shen in conversation with Joyce Chung, Curator at Asian Arts Initiative, as they delve into the creative practice behind her current exhibition and how Shen experiments with making instruments and spatial relationship of sound.
About the Artist
Victoria Shen is a sound artist, experimental music performer, and instrument-maker based in San Francisco.
Shen's sound practice is concerned with the spatiality/physicality of sound and its relationship to the human body. Her music features analog modular synthesizers, vinyl/resin records, and self-built electronics. Eschewing conventions in harmony and rhythm in favor of extreme textures and gestural tones, Shen uses what she calls "chaotic sound" to oppose signal and information, eluding traditionally embedded meaning.
In her live performances, she proposes an exploration between meaning and non-meaning through the physical activation of noise tropes. Her probing into these melodic voids interrogate the ways we perceive value within aural experiences. Shen’s multimedia practice extends beyond musical composition and performance to include installation and non-traditional methods of distribution. Her DIY approach to deconstructing the concepts of “materiality, value and mass production” both integrate and re-contextualize the formats of the readymade and assemblage techniques.
